"This is the first development release of Compiz Fusion, the result of more than six months of work and polish. Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the Compiz community plugin set 'Compiz Extras' and the parts of the Beryl project that are independent of the window manager core. The two communities have re-united to create a user experience for Linux that rivals anything available on other platforms."

Just out of interest, what's your performance with twinview? I have an xp2600 with 2G of ram (gentoo, using the cvs/git version of compiz fusion) where the performance is fine with one monitor (1680x1050), but the second I enable the second monitor (same res) the FPS drops and it feels like software rendinger all of a sudden. This is admittadly an older nvidia 4200 video card (256mb I think, both monitors using VGA connectors).

I don't think it's the video card because the performance is fine with one monitor. If you have fine performance with two monitors please post specs, OS, versions, etc.

It's good to have Beryl and Compiz successfully merged, but I'm really rather disappointed that after so long in development, it's still missing really basic window management features. The simple experience of basic window management on Compiz Fusion with gtk-window-decorator is so massively far behind metacity. I filed bugs on various issues with Beryl last year, but they were ignored.

The major problem I have is that it doesn't do any edge detection, which means positioning windows against the screen edge is needlessly painful. It is also buggy at handling maximized windows when two displays are attached (the window flicks between being the size of each display). I also have other problems with gimmie integration that metacity does not have.

Having enabled this, I note a further problem with it - it doesn't consider the top of the panel (or bottom, or side, depending on where your panel is) to be a screen edge. Metacity does, and Compiz should.

It is also buggy at handling maximized windows when two displays are attached...

I've noticed window maximization problems on only one display (my laptop). I thought it might be the ATI drivers so I tried the same version of the window manager on an Nvidia based machine and had the same problem.

I'm sure it won't be long until the major bugs are worked out though; this is just the first development release.

I would have thought you a KDE user. I think we'll have to wait for KDE4 for compositing window management done right. It's unrealistic to expect an immature window manager to exhibit the polish of KWin or Metacity.

Maturity is relative. Metacity and KWin will always be more mature than Compiz, although the gap will become insignificant over time. Six months isn't a very long time, even in the free software community, and expectations are high. Most desktop Linux users don't run Compiz yet, so there's still a lot of bugs to be shaken out.

Agree with you insofar as I find that Beryl is terrible "out of the box", with a garish theme that looks a bit like something out of a Flash Gordon comic, and all sorts of wrong-headed user interface gaffes, but it's heart is in the right place. Fortunately, with the level tweaking Beryl allows, it can be adapted to actually enhance usability, eg: the "inside cube" desktop switching method takes advantage of spatial memory by placing the user in the center of a virtual room.

It's easier to remember that the window you were just using is on the wall behind you than it is to remember that it's on adjacent virtual desktop two desktops to the right, because having to remember what is around you is natural.

Another note on the cube switching effect, or Apple's sliding effect in current pre-releases of Leopard; Usually if we clear all programs off our desktop, it's because we have finished with them (or because we temporarily want to access desktop items before bringing them all back again -a symptom of poor UI design for another day). Virtual desktops are for the exact opposite of the first situation, when you have too many tasks or the tasks on your desktop are too distracting. It is precisely because we want to work more that we need virtual desktops, so it's nice if the process of switching desktops is reassuringly different to the process of closing all the windows.

The alt-tab switcher in Beryl is vastly superior to that in any other window manager I've seen in Linux and I'm pretty sure I've seen most of them. Also, the ability to maximize windows horizontally and vertically as well as in both directions at once is more accessible in Beryl than in Metacity, it also provides the ability to maximize any window to fill the entire screen whether it provides that ability or not.

The expose like functionality in Beryl has a great usability gain over it's Mac counterpart, the ability to input into and even close the scaled down versions of the applications by using focus-follows-mouse. This is one of those rare occasions where the cheap knock-off is actually better than the original. I rarely bother with the feature on my PowerBook because it's not nearly as useful.

The community is immature. A lot of the beryl team focused more on eye candy than actual functionality with a few exceptions. The compiz team didn't have the sheer number of devs that beryl had and so a lot of things are more conservative. I personally don't see a big difference between compiz and metacity, or kwin for that matter. One could argue that Kwin will have an immature compositing backend, which is obvious even now as a lot of effects are buggy and definitely need work. A year from now it might be a different story, the same can be said about compiz. A lot of effects that were shown at the Novell thingy haven't been implemented yet (such as multiple wallpapers for each desktop, and this beautiful zoom plugin whic kde has copied in KDE4). I really don't see any reason that metacity should get any compositing features, compiz is pretty good at what it does and all it really needs is better handling of windows. I personally think metacity is busted anyway. When I close an application at full screen it opens at full screen and won't let you minimize it because the window opens to take up all of the desktop. You have to minimize it then resixe it to a smaller size that won't take up all your screen realestate. Maybe it's an option but it seems stupid to me. Compiz doesn't do this at all. The only reason I don;t use compiz all the time is because aiglx and the oss ati drivers have issues with video playing, Where the video is just a solid color and you have to resize the window to get it to show the video. It's freaking annoying.

I've been using compiz-fusion SVN on and off from from the Gentoo xeffects overlay. I have to say it's improved quite a bit since Compiz 0.50 was released (I found Beryl to be horribly unstable compared to Compiz). The new switcher plugins are especially shiney.

Wobbly windows still screw up under CPU load though whereas metacity remains smooth.